Yayoi Kusama: Accumulation No. 1

A prototype of Pop art, Kusama's innovative and controversial first sculpture-a chair bedecked with canvas phalluses-carried her distinctive "infinity net" into the third dimension.

When the Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama (born 1929) moved to New York in 1958, she had already developed her distinctive "infinity net" motif: a signature pattern of interlocking cellular forms painted on room-size canvases with the stated goal of covering "the entire world." With Accumulation No. 1 (1962), Kusama expanded this ambitious fantasy into three dimensions, creating the first in an ongoing series of sculptures composed of household furniture covered with stuffed and hand-sewn canvas phalluses and then painted. Accumulation No. 1 was shown at the Green Gallery in New York in late 1962, in what was widely considered the first group exhibition to focus on Pop art. Scholar Midori Yamamura examines the hypnotic, iconic work within the larger context of Kusama's famed "infinity net" motif and the famous polka-dot patterns that define her later work.